OmegaRED

Will developers one day realize invasive anti-piracy measures are not effective and only produce games that are playable online and require a legit cd key to play?

For example what good would it be to download World of Warcraft or Battlefield 2 when they are multiplayer based. Those games are still top sellers because people have to buy them to play it. If game companies followed this trend piracy would be brought to its knees.

I believe these are the only things keeping the Single Player games alive:

- many PC games are ports of consoles and those games are mostly single player

- some games have a massive fanbase (like Half Life and Doom) they are guaranteed large numbers of sales despite piracy

- brand loyalty: customers appreciate the effort by some game studios and continue to support them by buying their games.

__________________

Duranix

If they all invest in steam, then they will never have a REAL piracy issue

__________________

OmegaRED

Steam itself is one of the most actively used methods of piracy. Only multiplayer games such as CS: Source avoid piracy but this is not because of steam.

__________________

Duranix

oh really.

So how does CS:S avoid piracy? Does it have a magical wand that it waves at enemies?

Prove it

Starforce games are have been cracked, and always will be.

__________________

OmegaRED

Duranix it is simple, there is no point whatsoever in illegally downloading CS:Source when you couldn't play it on any legit server. Steam is no different than a cd key check that BF2 or Quake 4 has.

__________________

Duranix

LOL


try using someone elses CDkey on your steam account.

Come back and tell me what it says.


maybe you could play offline against bots?

__________________

OmegaRED

You've clearly missed the point. Steam has been hijacked and anyone can download all games from it without any cd keys.

But what if there was no point to this? If those games had almost all of the content as online only and used the tried and tested cd key format people would be forced to buy the games, either through steam or at a retail store.

__________________

Maddogg6

I heard years ago that ol Billy boy at M$'s vision was what is now being beta tested (or so I thought I've read on slashdot) - leased application via network - will pretty much put an end to 99% of their Office piracy. Sure, there will be a few with the ability to hi-jack it and make use of it illeaglly - but lets face it - us morons won't have a clue how to do it even if we read a well written manual explaining how - and then - that manual will prolly put someone behind bars - cuz, at that point their sharks will have a WHOLE lot more time on their hands tracking down the likes of such 'authors' and/or distributors of said manual.

Thats my $0.037 CAN.

OmegaRED

I really don't know what you just said but I agree.

__________________

Al_Vampyre

I very rarely play any multiplayer games online, I do play against my friends on a LAN though, so I just wouldn't buy any game that didn't have a single player side. I would agree that there will be a general move towards online content as internet speeds become higher and more available. I think it would actually work quite well as long as the pricing structure is correct.

For example, I would be prepared to pay a smaller amount each time to play a game as long as the total payments stop once you have reached what you would expect to pay for a retail copy. That way good games would make money at the same price point as they do now (less piracy) and bad games would get played once before people realised how crappy it was and stopped playing. If the fee was small enough then it would encourage me to try more games (I don't trust demos, been stung too often in the past). It might actually encourage people to spend extra time developing good games and not producing crap because they will make more money if a game is actually worth playing...

__________________
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad" - Brian O'Driscoll - Ireland Rugby Team 2009 Grand Slam winning Captain.

IvanV

EDIT: Sometimes I just don't read what others posted carefully enough, sorry.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

Sandok

No it won't.

Sanafabich

the login system. CS is all about MP. That could've done easily within the game's engine, so steam is not actually the one avoising piracy, is the registering system

Sandok

You know that piracy helps alot too though... Games that easily are pirated do make less money but they quickly touch every corner of the globe.

I'll take an example with M$ and it's software. XP for example has NO difficulty being pirated and M$ more or less turned a blind eye for a long time (now on the auto update, they verify ur XP but this could have been implemented centuries ago) but look at what happened. Market dominance.

Games are the same and thus, I don't see single player games dying fast at all!

OmegaRED

Microsofts tactic proves my theory, if you force customers to use online content with a serial verification they will be compelled to buy it.

With single player games there is no reason to buy it if you just downloaded it, the MS solution doesn't apply to single player games. Only with online games where you have to update regularly to play and pass cd key checks would you be forced to buy it if your copy was warez.

For this reason online games will have to be the only viable method to discourage piracy and it would slowly end the single player game on the PC.

__________________

daedal

The way I see it is that there are costs involved in live games/registration services. On one hand, they have to pay X ammount to keep the authentication servers up for one hulluva long time and on factor Y, there are still some people who are without an internet connection. I'm pretty sure they must do market studies when considering their options.

__________________

OmegaRED

Those costs are trivial to the amount of money they make for the decrease of piracy.

Also, there are two different types of online games. Only one costs the developer money:

- MMO like World of Warcraft which need worlds to play on. Look at what a huge success it is. Developer provides the servers and updates the world constantly.

- FPS games like CS:Source and BF2, neither game has a single player campaign (just bots) they are multiplayer based and the servers are provided by the customer. No cost to the developer. This is actually where I see online games going.

Piracy of these titles is not even a factor. The developers couldn't give a shit if you download them illegally cause you can't even play it. They know people will buy it and they will make all their games like that.

__________________

IvanV

There are at least three reasons why this won't happen:

1) It would be bad for business, as a lot of people prefer single player games.

2) There is no real reason to do it. We've all heared report about vast losses due to piracy. They all have (at least) one flaw: they presume that, if there were no piracy, the people would buy the same software legally. That's absolutely not true, as the major part of those "losses" comes from countries and people who simply wouldn't be able to afford the legal copy. For example, average salary in my country is $300, plus a lot of people are unemployed, so few people can afford to buy original Doom3, which costs around $100 US here. A good example that shows that most people who can also buy games and not download them is Galactic Civilizations 2, a game which had no protection at all (you only needed the original CD key to download free extra content), and still sold great! (This pissed off people from Invision, the guys who made Starforce so much, that they posted links to torrents of the game on their forum.) So actual losses are much smaller than those the reports claim.

3) It wouldn't solve anything, as people would make their own servers. The MMO games could be an exception, but not completely, as I know a guy who played WoW on a pirate server and he says that even though it's not as good as the "real thing" he still had a blast.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

topbob

this issue with single-player game piracy has always discusted me, the problem is the ppl that are downloading it dont feel like they are stealing it. theres basicly no way to stop it either, if you can make it you can break it.
although i do think if games would lower their base price to just $40 US, that alone would stop a lot of piracy. that way you dont need 3 20 dollar bills to buy one game, just two.

__________________

12090 in 3DMarks06 on current system, 5001 on old system, 4164 on older, 1587 on oldest

OmegaRED

So all the money invested in elaborate copy protection schemes is just for fun? Do you even have an idea how many games are downloaded from bittorrent by people who have money. Take a look at the country flags of the downloaders they can afford it.

If game companies shift to online gaming only for PC games the piracy losses drop to nothing. Maybe your friend was satisfied playing on a cracked WoW server but others like him would eventually pay up.

If anything, the best thing going for single player games is they don't have much replay value. An online game could get you hooked for years and that person will be less inclined to purchase other games. Game companies want you to buy more games not just stick with one good one so they might pump out crap like The Godfather and reap the returns.

__________________

Sandok

You really think everyone pirates don't you? A small tiny part of the world population has broadband and thus, has the possiblity to download programs.

Outta those small percent with broadband, not even a quarter know how to use a torrent...

You are just paranoid and a fan of Starforce... No replay value in SP games? That's already reason enough to just not even discuss this subject with you since you are already pretty convinced of your situation. Games will stay SP and pirating exists and always shall...

People used to copy left and right back when I was getting into games and they still make SP games some 10 years later. Plz, stop worring.

OmegaRED

When I see a game torrent with over 10,000 people downloading from just one tracker out of hundreds I don't think of the word small. There aren't many gamers with a broadband connection who haven't tried to download a game.

I first had this thought years ago when BF1942 came out and all the pirates went out and bought it cause they had to. I'm not a fan of Starforce I simply think that the majority of people who hate it are those who illegally download games.

The technology was never there to play online games like WoW or BF2 10 years ago so there goes that argument. Now most gamers have access to broadband and such games are huge money makers it is a logical next step to produce games everyone has to buy instead of games some people will buy and others will pirate.

__________________

Retarp

I think it all boils down to price vs the quality of the game.

I won't pay $60 for a game. If that happens in the next couple of years, I'm going to pirating.


I think the only game I've bought at face value in the last year has been Quake IV ($50) & Serious Sam 2, and SS2 was only $30! Quake IV was an awesome game and well worth the $$$$. I got Oblivian for $40 and that's the only reason I didn't wait to buy it.


I got NFS: MW, Doom III, Civ IV, and a whole slew of others either at clearence discount or from the used games rack.

And yes, I HATE starforce. A friend of mine bought (with money, at a store, imagine that ) Bet on Soldier. Biggest POS game ever made. The copyright protection flat out didn't let him play the game on his computer. He exchanged it for FEAR

Sandok

You know lotsa good peeps cuz trust me, nobody around here in my little country can even use a torrent. Sure there are people but a few thousand on millions or billions? Nothing.



You obviously think very badly since most of the people who are affected by it bought the bloody games. And as said in the other thread, pirates can bypass it as easily as any other safety mesure (maybe not you...)

IvanV

Maybe it wasn't meant to be but... The world is yet to see a game that will be saved from piratization by copy protection. If a disc can be read, it can be copied, it's as simple as that.

Also, when you gave statistics about how many times had a game been illegally copied, you didn't mention how many times it had benn legally bought, and you insinuated that everyone who had got a pirate copy would have bought it if he had been unable to find it piratized, which was wrong.

You have a very strong oppinion on this subject, are you a member of a game developers team that just went bankrupt or what?

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

SFOSOK

I'm a pirate, ARRRRGGG

__________________
*Warning* - Explicit Content Preceeding



METAL!!

niceguyrichy

dear lord god

3,285 posts later, and sfosok says something I find funny!


but seriously omegaguy, do you work for them or something?

pirating will always take place in some form, because for every incredibaly clever game programmer, there's an equally clever hacker. Fact.

but I guarentee that if somebody did come up with a completely fool-proof system to stop hackers tomorrow, the price of a new game wouldn't change a bit.
and that's what's particularly galling about the whole drm, starforce, apple etc thing

__________________

OmegaRED

No, I figured I'd try and have a little class and not scream it to the entire forum especially since warez is a touchy subject here (good way to get banned too). In the interests of full disclosure I've only bought 3 games in 3 years...and downloaded about 200, 20 of which are installed now. I only really get around to playing BF2 though. The only games that I felt were worth buying are multiplayer games.

__________________

EcPercy

I think that steam and other networks based on similar technology are what will end most of the piracy.

The way I look at it. If you have a database with all of the keys that your company generated and you run a script against the accounts weekly (during a scheduled maintenance window) you can eliminate the freeloaders that somehow hack accounts. Of course, you will need to build a huge gaming network as well.

If you require even the single player games to authenticate (similar to steam) then people will need to be legit in order to play.

Sandok

Steam is quite good imho because yes, people pirate but tons can't do it for steam and I personalyl think that an updated version of steam is the way to go!